


Caffeine

by 4racha



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, Best Friends, Friendship/Love, Light Angst, M/M, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Love, felix is oblivious and cant math, jisung is a hopeless romantic and a hopeless boy in general
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-11-26 09:02:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18178604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/4racha/pseuds/4racha
Summary: Caffeine is bad for Jisung.





	Caffeine

_“Who says a couple needs to depend on each other? In the case of marriage, mutual dependence means loving each other, but loving is ultimately a selfish act, which you do regardless of whether the other person loves you back or not.”_

 

-

 

It’s three in the morning and Jisung just came out of the shower. He was ruffling his hair in the towel he had used just a few hours prior. Sighing, he walks back to his bedroom and sits at the foot of the bed and lazily let’s the towel hang off of his pajama pants. He doesn’t care that the damp towel is transferring the water to his pants. He doesn’t seem to care about anything on account that he still hasn’t fallen asleep yet.

However, it’s been like this for Jisung for the past few years. The insomnia, numerous showers in a day, and lack of self-empathy: they were all too well-acquainted with him. Though, he figures he has nobody but himself to blame. But he just can’t seem to get _him_ out of his head. He can’t seem to deny the fact that he still loves _him_ despite him not returning back the feelings.

 

It started out so innocently. Jisung always saw _him_ on his way to his locker during high school. It was cute. _He_ always waved at him with a smile that made his heart skip a beat. They were just acquaintances at this point, casually seeing each other in the hallway. It wasn’t until Felix was the boy he had to tutor every Thursday for math. He never wanted to embarrass _him_ , but he was pretty bad at math. Really bad. But Jisung was too sweet (or too infatuated) to ever get frustrated or upset with Felix when he did a wrong step or had a wrong answer.

They got closer from this, going from acquaintances to friends. They eventually got closer after they graduated high school when they attended the same college. For the first few years, they had a few general elective classes together. In fact, Jisung and Felix purposely scheduled their time slots to work well with each other, if not be exactly the same.

Jisung couldn’t deny it any longer: he was madly in love with Felix at this point. He thought of _him_ every single hour of every single day. In the morning, Jisung smiled and blushed whenever he saw a good morning text message from Felix. He always looked forward to picking up their usual cafe order before he met up for the lecture class an hour later. Jisung never got tired of their daily routines if that meant he could see him everyday. Even in the evening, he often waited for Felix outside his night classes and always offered to walk him to wherever he needed to be that night. And every time Jisung laid in bed at night, he couldn’t sleep because of Felix. He was always the last thought in his mind, but Felix began to become the only thought in his mind at night.

Jisung grew worried at this point. There was no denying his feelings for Felix, but what were Felix’s feelings for him? He couldn’t just ask him directly about it because he doesn’t know how that would affect their friendship. What if he didn’t like him like that? It’d be so awkward for the both of them, so much so that they might drift apart. And what if Felix got offended by him asking? What if he somehow ended up mad at him for asking? No, Jisung couldn’t risk that. Jisung couldn’t risk anything that would make Felix end up leaving him. Rather than risking it, he wanted to keep things as is.

And because of this, Jisung had been writing unsent letters to Felix. He usually wrote them when he was in his apartment late at night where he sat at his desk with a coffee in his left hand and a pen in his right. He wrote extraneous letters to _him_ , pouring out how he felt about _him_ on that particular day and one thing he loved about _him_ as well. It started to become a habit for Jisung. Every night, he would do the same thing for the next two years, in which he would develop insomnia and an addition to caffeine at night. He knew it probably wasn’t healthy for himself, but he thought it was the best way for him to express himself since he couldn’t exactly tell Felix what he felt despite the fact that he tells him everything.

 

And that’s where things started going south.

 

The day that Felix said that he had exciting news, Jisung didn’t expect his heart to plummet down to his stomach on their lunch date.

Felix had a crush. Not on Jisung, though. But a fellow business student in his department. Jisung recognized the name and he tried to hold a composed stature as Felix kept lollygagging over his crush on Chan: how smart, how stunning, how tall, how funny, how quirky. Jisung kept feeling his heart sink lower and lower inside, but he kept a smile outside, telling Felix he’s happy that he found someone he likes.

Jisung didn’t expect it to go even lower though.

Though he wasn’t exactly friends with Chan, he knew about him. He knows that Minho and Hyunjin often invited Chan over to their place to help cook and make food for parties they held almost every weekend. He knows that Chan is in the best and most prestige business fraternity that the college has to offer, not to mention that he’s on the council for the frat as well. But the worst part to Jisung was that every single day, he had to hear Felix rant on and on about how clueless and oblivious Chan was to his pursuit. Which meant that Jisung had to always hear the love of his life talk about someone who wasn’t him.

At night, his letters to Felix began to grow longer, extending to three or sometimes four pages of rambling and feelings of sorrow, love, guilt, and unhappiness. His cup of coffee upgraded to a jug of coffee, before he just started keeping the coffee pot next to his desk so he could drink straight out of it.

Soon, his life started beginning to change as well.

It was his third year in college and he didn’t expect his daily routine to change. But it did.

He was no longer basing his schedule around Felix since their schedules could no longer revolve around each other. In fact, Felix was so busy with the paperwork he had to do and the meetings he had to attend that Jisung could barely find time to ever spend time with him. Jisung didn’t pick up their cafe order, he didn’t wait for Felix by their usual lunch spot, he didn’t even wait outside of his night classes nor walk Felix back to his place. His schedule was very Felix-less, and he felt more and more empty inside.

His letters at night began to look like essays, reaching about ten pages now. Jisung’s words began to grow much more depressed and helpless. He started doubling his caffeine intake and sleeping less and less as he wrote into the night, eventually pulling all-nighters at least four times a week.

On top of that, his other friends were growing busy as well. Not to mention, that nobody else knew about Jisung’s one-sided crush on Felix. Even his closest friends, Changbin and Hyunjin, despite knowing that he was best friends with Felix, didn’t think Jisung liked him more than that. But he did. He still did.

It wasn’t until one Saturday that he found an afternoon text message from Felix. The first one Jisung’s gotten in a while since he doesn’t get daily morning texts from him anymore. He couldn’t help but smile when he saw his name, but he pouted when he read that she wanted to vent to him. Jisung had every right and reason to deny meeting up with Felix because he knew what that entailed.

But Jisung was so deprived of seeing Felix’s smile, seeing the way he fixed his hair behind his ear, seeing how he always tapped his coffee cup with his pointer and middle finger a certain way, seeing how he drowned his coffee in sugar. He missed everything about Felix. Jisung just missed him. And as much as it pains him, he decided to meet up with him.

They met at the cafe he usually gets their morning coffee from, only this day it didn’t seem as cheerful and lively as he was used to. It felt gloomy, it felt constricted, and Jisung wasn’t liking the atmosphere that surrounded him one bit. He saw Felix waiting at their usual table with a cup of water instead of his usual order. Jisung’s heart sunk just looking at FElix and he forced himself to walk over to where he was, slowly trudging and dreading every step of the way.

Felix looked up from his phone and smiled, gesturing Jisung to sit across from him. Jisung sat down and felt the muscles throughout his body grow more and more tense as each second passed on.

At first, they started catching up with what they’ve been doing. It was hard to deny that Jisung loved just hearing Felix’s voice so close to him once again. It was like music to his ears, listening to an old song he used to love hearing everyday. However, it wasn’t until Chan’s name was said aloud that his muscles tensed up once again as if it was piercing his body.

He tried to adjust his position on the chair to relax, but it was difficult. And the fact that he was running on four coffee pots worth of caffeine and no sleep wasn’t helping him either. Felix started saying how every time he tried to ask Chan on a date that Chan didn’t get the idea of the date as romantic.

Jisung’s heart stopped beating for a second at those words. Chan’s been spending more time with Felix than Jisung has. Chan has been the one to get Felix’s good morning text messages and the one to spend lunch with him and wait outside of him evening classes. Not to mention, Chan has been the one to walk Felix back to his place. And yet Chan didn’t know of Felix’s crush on him.

After that particularly long rant, Felix sighs. “You just don’t know how bad it hurts to like someone so much and for them to have no idea how you feel.”

Jisung looks at Felix with a sad smile, eyes helplessly looking at him. “No, I guess I don’t.”


End file.
